When Shopping for Books on Your Own Shelves Leaves You with Simone de Beauvoir

and other thoughts on new books and old

“Applying the Bronzer,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

I bought new books—Why Fish Don’t Exist (Lulu Miller), Marion Hatley (Beth Castrodale), Leaving (Roxana Robinson), Wild Dark Shore (Charlotte McGonaghy), Stone Yard Devotional (Charlotte Wood)—and read them, eager. Read them for the sweep of their stories, the fineries of their sentences, the curve of their settings and scenes, the thoughts that inevitably percolate about what works when and why in story, the affirmation of how hard it is to carry a plot across hundreds of pages and how thrilling it is when an author defies the odds (Read Marion Hatley for an odds defier!; it is complete, it is whole, beginning to end.). For a few weeks there, I was utterly immersed. Then: real life. Then: The tile need scrubbing, the garden wanted weeding, and the refrigerator was all chill, no food.

Wake up.

As a matter of fact, the shelves also needed dusting, and so, post-scrubbing, -weeding, and -foraging, I dutifully dusted. It wasn’t long before I was once again eschewing my worldly responsibilities so that I could go shopping for books on my own shelves. Over the past year, I’ve re-read Michael Ondaatje, Wallace Stegner, Per Petterson, Alyson Hagy, Fae Myenne Ng, Carolyn Forché, Claire Keegan, Raymond Carver, Alice McDermott, Natalie Kusz, Virginia Woolf, and James Salter, among others. This time I settled on Simone de Beauvoir.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I have no memory at all of reading All Men Are Mortal in the first place. It just never did seem like my kind of book. It seemed like—I’ll say it—a stretch, a performative shelf hogger. Its own flap copy calls it a “captivating exemplum of the existentialist credo.” Exemplum? Credo? Its primary characters: a narcissistic actress and a man who is immortal. Oh, yum. Having recently re-read Woolf’s Orlando, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was in the mood for another character whose life went on and on.

But I persisted. Reading things that are hard for you is good for you, Beth. I thought. Foolishly. As if the world itself isn’t hard enough. As if Someone in the Sky is going to give me an A plus for reading philosophy in the form of a (leaving this adjective\adverb space blank) novel.

No one is going to give me an A plus.

Here’s my report: I had previously read All Men Are Mortal. There are margin notes to prove it, underlines and exclamation marks. I had myself to lean on, in other words, as I struggled mightily, in this present hour, to turn the pages. My past self to my present self: Who the hell is Annie? Why the reordering of words? So he proves his own immortality by slashing his own throat and surviving? The price of existence means you can’t flinch with compassion? And now, quoting from the novel itself, for my markings make it inky clear that this is the novel’s big-time message: “It takes a lot of strength, a lot of pride, or a lot of love to believe that man’s acts have any importance, that life outweighs death.”

Okay, then. After page 70, I started to skim, started to read only those parts that I had annotated who knows how long ago. I wish I had not grown up thinking I needed stratosphere grades. Imagine the time I’d have saved.

Now that I’ve put the eternally damned Mortal back on its shelf, it’s time to dust the other bookcase. From where I stand I am beguiled. The Falling Boy (David Long). The Beet Queen (Louise Erdrich). The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai). Versailles (Kathryn Davis). Three Apples Fell From Heaven (Micheline Aharonian Marcom). That should be enough for a while. Hope we don’t run out of eggs.

***

Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story received a Booklist star alongside gorgeous words by Carol Haggas; Beth Castrodale of Small Picks Press called the writing in the novel “staggeringly beautiful.” The book will be available wherever books are sold beginning on April 1.

My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write books about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit) can be found here.

I’ve updated my author website. Whoops. Wrong. My husband did. He gets the week’s A plus.